Searching for the Heart of Britain

About the book

Thirty-six journeys. Twenty-five years. One question: what is Britain, really — and why do Americans fall in love with a version of it the British experience so differently?

Jonathan Thomas, founder of the web’s largest Anglophile community, has spent his adult life chasing the answer. In Searching for the Heart of Britain, he takes you with him — onto a Victorian steamer down England’s most beautiful lake, into a frozen Dorset cottage at New Year’s, through the village that became the world’s first suburb, into Highclere Castle where Americans still come to find Downton Abbey, and onto a steam train to the Cornish sea on the one perfect day of a long-awaited summer. He steps into the locked room where Churchill slept, descends into the bunker where Britain ran a war, and stands in Thomas Hardy’s birthplace and Laurie Lee’s valley, asking what these places still hold, why the British cherish them, and why they should become part of the American geography of Britain.

Along the way, a bigger story emerges: how a proud, careful nation sees itself, why it cherishes its steam engines long after the rest of the world moved on, what its love of a good cup of tea and a fair price really says about it — and how all of it deepens the affection an American feels for the place.

This is a book for the Anglophile who has read the guidebooks and wants something the guidebooks can’t give: the feeling of belonging to a place you weren’t born to. Equal parts travelogue, history, and love letter, it completes the trilogy that began with Adventures in Anglotopia and End to End — and stands entirely on its own.